The first paragraph of Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution of the United States grants the president “Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” Donald Trump, keeping a campaign promise he made many times, acted within hours of retaking the White House.
President Donald Trump has pardoned, commuted the prison sentences or vowed to dismiss the cases of all of the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, including people convicted of assaulting police officers, using his clemency powers on his first day back in office to undo the massive prosecution of the unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy. Trump’s action, just hours after his return to the White House on Monday, paves the way for the release from prison of people found guilty of violent attacks on police, as well as leaders of far-right extremist groups convicted of failed plots to keep the Republican in power after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.
Donald Trump had no qualms. For the president, violence on his behalf is not just okay; it is the stuff of patriots. He has celebrated and continues to celebrate such violence. In 2020, Trump advised the Proud Boys, “Stand back and stand by.” In 2025, he has rewarded them — and everyone else convicted of violence on January 6 — as only a president can. Trump’s Get Out Of Jail Free card grants them the status of MAGA folk heroes as he sends them back to our communities.
With these pardons and commutations, with the order to DOJ to stop all prosecutions, Trump has sent a signal to all that he will govern — to the furthest extent possible — as an authoritarian. This is not a surprise for anyone paying attention. This was his promise. This is a pattern we have all watched play out.
I watched Trump’s address as he delivered it. Although I planned to read through the transcript before commenting, selecting a number of points to respond to, I haven’t done that. (What a slog that would be.) Instead I’ll comment on just two things that struck me at the time.
… and my fellow citizens, the golden age of America begins right now. From this day forward, our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world. We will be the envy of every nation, and we will not allow ourselves to be taken advantage of any longer. During every single day of the Trump administration, I will, very simply, put America first. Our sovereignty will be reclaimed. Our safety will be restored. The scales of justice will be rebalanced. The vicious, violent, and unfair weaponization of the Justice Department and our government will end. And our top priority will be to create a nation that is proud, prosperous, and free. . . .
This screed isn’t strictly a torrent of lies, but the predicate of series – and much of the speech and of Trumpism – is a torrent of lies. Going back to the Bush 2 administration, Democratic critics were taunted as part of the “reality-based community.”
Trump is not just more of the same. A world-class inveterate liar, who has mastered the big lie, he has amped up this rejection of reality as we know it, as we witness it with our own eyes. The dystopian America of Trump’s address rests on MAGA lies and fever dreams.
The journey to reclaim our republic has not been an easy one — that, I can tell you. Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom and, indeed, to take my life. Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear. But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. That is why each day under our administration of American patriots, we will be working to meet every crisis with dignity and power and strength. We will move with purpose and speed to bring back hope, prosperity, safety, and peace for citizens of every race, religion, color, and creed.
Note first that the passage begins (after he praises himself) with an accusation directed at his enemies. The folks who oppose him politically — elected leaders, political and volunteer activists, concerned citizens, … and half the country’s voters — are grouped with attempted assassins. The man is painting a fraudulent picture with a dangerously broad brush.
With this speech, directed to what the founders described as a faction, not to the country as a whole, Trump is deliberately taunting, trolling, and demeaning half of America.
If you oppose Trump, you tried to kill him. If you oppose Trump, you oppose God. If you oppose Trump, you will be justifiably subject to Trump’s wrath (now fortified by the power of the Executive Branch).
So goes the twisted logic of the contemporary Republican Party.
“For most of corporate America, they didn’t know what to make of the first one,” said Marc Short, who was chief of staff to former vice president Mike Pence. “They’ve learned that President Trump is very transactional, and so I think there’s an incentive for them to be a lot more generous this inauguration.”
And transactional is the key Trump trait that has led to conquering D.C., corporate titans, oligarchs, Congressional Republicans, et al. Money, of course, is what most interests Trump. And for everyone seeking favor (or fending off disfavor) from the vindictive president, throwing money at Trump — lots of money — is imperative.
Not quite two weeks ago, I cited a New York Times report that Trump had reeled in more than $200 million since election day. Four days ago, Axios reported that the figure is now $500 million. Money raised for his inaugural committees tops $150 million, far and away a record.
1. “They have the potential to really become a free-for-all for influence-buying with an incoming administration,” said Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform at the Campaign Legal Center. “It’s a sure bet, unlike a campaign contribution. You know the recipient is going to be the president and obviously will have a lot of influence over various policies that are going to impact a corporation’s financial future.” and 2. “What he enjoys is the campaign and the winning; the governing part can be messy,” Short said. “He likes it when he wins. When he passes a big bill like tax relief, that’s a win. When he gets a Supreme Court justice confirmed, that’s a win. But the everyday, if it’s not centered around him, it’s kind of, in his mind, boring.”
The first quotation illustrates corporate America’s strong incentive when shoveling money Trump’s way to make sure it gets into his pocket.
The second quotation acknowledges Trump’s indifference to public policy. He’s selling favor. The issue doesn’t matter to him. He’s willing to change his mind about EVs (as a quid pro quo with Elon Musk) or TikTok (after meeting with GOP mega-donor Jeff Yass) or — you name it — so long as you’re willing to pay up. Being indifferent to issues of national significance is advantageous if you’re looking to maximize money pouring into your pocket.
On another note: introducing the Trump Meme
Finally, a scheme where the quid pro quo lacks the quo expected of Trump. In this case, something for something means gobs of money (billions!) funneled to Trump in return for … a commemorative coin. (No, I’m not a fan of cryptocurrency.) Let’s grant that this is not a standard-issue transactional exchange.
“I am extremely proud of what we continue to accomplish in crypto,” Eric Trump said in a statement to The New York Times. “$Trump is currently the hottest digital meme on earth.” He added: “This is just the beginning.”
Yes, even the “serious,” well-informed Republican senators with reputations for their commitment to national security are bending the knee to Donald Trump. Just over two months ago, when Trump announced Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense, there were doubts about whether he could get confirmed in a closely divided Senate. National security and national intelligence committees traditionally have found much bipartisan agreement. Surely a number of Republicans could be expected to take the Senate’s advice and consent responsibilities seriously.
That was not to be. After a cursory hearing Tuesday no Republican member of the Senate Armed Services Committee rose to the occasion; all voted to send Hegseth’s nomination to the Senate floor. Tom Nichols wrote in the Atlantic:
What America and the world saw today was not a serious examination of a serious man. Instead, Republicans on the committee showed that they would rather elevate an unqualified and unfit nominee to a position of immense responsibility than cross Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or the most ardent Republican voters in their home states. America’s allies should be deeply concerned; America’s enemies, meanwhile, are almost certainly laughing in amazement at their unexpected good fortune.
Republican senator Joni Ernst, a military veteran, whose resume includes serving as a commanding officer of the 1168th Transportation Company in Kuwait during the Iraq War, and who is a sexual assault survivor, raised questions about Hegseth early on, challenging especially his view that women are unqualified to serve in combat. (That view stems from Hegseth’s celebration of hypermasculinity, which accompanies his religious conviction that women must submit to men’s authority regarding government, church, and family.)
Senator Ernst quickly learned the consequences of bucking Trump, as his transition team launched a ferocious campaign to intimidate potential witnesses and GOP senators, as reported by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker. Mayer wrote:
In December, a dark-money group previously backed by Elon Musk, Building America’s Future, also began pouring money into the fight. It spent half a million dollars on ads pressuring Ernst to support Hegseth after she voiced doubts about him. Musk and other Trump allies have made clear that they will fund primary challenges against Republican senators who oppose Trump’s nominees.
Ernst backed away from her judgment. No other Republican senator at the hearing dared to articulate criticism of Trump’s pick on any grounds whatsoever.
Meanwhile in the House of Representatives: Yesterday Speaker of the House Mike Johnson removed Mike Turner as Chair of the House Intelligence Committee. Turner, who has sometimes disagreed with Donald Trump — supporting U.S. aid to Ukraine and voting in 2021 to certify Biden’s election — is “well-respected on both sides of the aisle.” That, until the Trump era, was characteristic of the leaders in both chambers of Congress who oversaw national security issues.
Both parties, since the start of the Cold War, have (mostly) respected as a guiding principle “politics stops at the water’s edge.” No longer. At this early stage, this Congress is taking a cavalier approach to guarding its authority; it is abjectly ducking its Constitutional responsibilities.
We have entered an era when loyalty to Trump is the order of the day. That is the credo of the Republican leadership in Congress. Individual members of the GOP with well-informed convictions, if they will not acknowledge obeisance to Trump, are pushed aside. To avoid this fate, they must acquiesce by remaining silent.
This endemic capitulation will diminish our country’s security and leave the United States ill-prepared to address a panoply of issues with global significance.
As wildfires rage through the greater Los Angeles area, the incoming president sounds off in a pair of posts on Truth Social:
Governor Gavin Newscum refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California. Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes. A true disaster!
and
NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA. THIS IS WHAT JOE BIDEN IS LEAVING ME. THANKS JOE!
These posts reveal Trump’s narcissism, ignorance, and callousness. In reverse order:
Callousness: Donald Trump campaigned on a threat to cut off disaster aid to California and as president, he will have the power to follow through on the threat. At this stage (while the wildfires are not even close to being contained, with unusually strong winds expected to return this week), the reports as of this morning are of 16 dead and more than 150,000 people forced from their homes. With more than 19,000 structures burned, many families will not have homes to return to. All of these numbers will increase in the days ahead.
Ignorance: His social media posts are replete with misstatements. CNN offers a rundown, while the Los Angeles Times features a number of reports from journalists, commentators, and others with an understanding of what is taking place (including, among several examples, here, here, and here).
There is considerable irony in the fact that the president-elect, who castigated the mental acuity of the current president, is a wellspring of such a miasma of misinformation following a natural disaster; this constitutes a pattern for Trump.
California Governor Gavin Newsom and Kathryn Barger, Chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, have invited the incoming president to tour the fire damage to see firsthand the scale of the disaster and the human suffering.
Narcissism: Everything is, first and foremost, about him. And, as a corollary, Trump has never for a moment embraced a commitment to serve as president of the country as a whole, on behalf of all Americans. Not even a feint in that direction. Not in either of his two campaigns for president, nor in his first stint in the White House. That makes him unique among our presidents. [Note: Gerald Ford, who inspired the Daily News headline that I’ve echoed above, did not reject his responsibility to the country writ large, nor did his predecessor, who notoriously had an enemies list. Nor any president, apart from Trump, before or since.]
A number of observers, including a man who worked in three Republican presidential campaigns (for Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and John McCain), have noted how extraordinary this is:
“I can’t think of a president, Republican or Democrat, that has tried to inject partisan politics into an ongoing disaster relief effort,” said Dan Schnur, who served as a communications strategist for former California GOP Gov. Pete Wilson and now teaches at USC, UC Berkeley and Pepperdine. “Presidents of both parties have always said very harsh and very nasty things about the other party,” Schnur noted. “But we’ve never had a president, or a president-elect for that matter, start taking shots while people are still in danger.”
A political scientist concurs:
“We, as a country, have a road map for this,” said Kristin Taylor, a professor at Wayne State University who has written extensively about the politics of natural disaster. It involves empathy and a lot of federal support, she said, which “sends a big signal that the government’s here and we’ve got your back.” Trump, by contrast, regards the firestorm “as a political opportunity to stick it to Gavin Newsom. And to stick it to a state that didn’t vote for him,” Taylor said. “And using disasters and disaster response as leverage for punishing political foes is brand spanking for new for us.”
Climate Change is here now.
Another approach to understanding the catastrophe unfolding in California is looking toward the consequences of climate change, rather than malfeasance by Democrats in office or blue state voters.
Several seasons of heavy rain followed by a year of severe drought plus unprecedented hurricane-force winds after fires had ignited both explain the current wildfires. Both are anticipated consequences of the dramatic change of climate affecting our planet. No one in the leadership of the Republican Party, not least the man who will soon return to the Oval Office, will acknowledge these truths.
Instead, we get deceitful social media posts and vengeful threats to ensure harm to Americans regarded as enemies of MAGA.
Our president-elect posted that on Truth Social last month after dining with Elon Musk. In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory, there has been a stampede of oligarchs vying to be friends with the vindictive man who will wield extraordinary political power beginning on January 20. [The link below offers a brief review of the most prominent.]
Billionaires are generally pragmatic men intent on preserving their measure of wealth and the enterprises that have brought them their fortunes. Regarding their bowing and scraping before the next president, they are acting in a consummately rational fashion. They have a great deal to lose (or to gain) from soon-to-be President Trump, who on a mere whim could impose significant losses on them (or send great benefits their way).
Democracy does not die in darkness. It degrades through deal-making — a procession of pragmatic transactions between those who have power and those who want it or fear it.
Yes, someone wrote this speech for the then-president. He didn’t. The words were a response to a huge backlash to the January 6 violence. And of course Trump is a prodigious liar. But (whether speaking sincerely or cynically) in acknowledging the violence, his statement articulated the consensus view of what we had all seen with our own eyes the day before. Not just from Democrats or liberals or the mainstream media, but observers across the political spectrum. What we saw was a violent mob attacking the Capitol, climbing walls, busting through doors and windows, and savaging beating the police. (The January 6 Committee compiled much of this video history, while laying out the conspiracy that began months earlier to delegitimize the 2020 election). Americans at home watched this assault unfold on TV and the Internet, in real time and afterwards.
So too did many elected leaders of the Republican Party (including those in Congress who had hidden and fled in fear), who condemned the violent attack on the Capitol in the weeks following. A few, Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Kevin McCarthy placed blame directly on Trump. (So too did Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, whom the party repudiated for their consistency.)
Who could doubt what we all witnessed?Not many, back then. But a few. From day one and throughout the spring, as Dan Barry and Alan Feuer reported this week, MAGA allies were trying to purge the truth.
As months passed, gaslighting and concocting new stories — waving away what we had seen and inventing phony scenarios — were the order of the day for Trumpists. In May Congressman Andrew Clyde likened January 6 to “a normal tourist visit.” By June, Tucker Carlson was promoting a “false flag” conspiracy theory shifting blame for the rioting to the FBI. In July, Donald Trump invoked Ashli Babbitt as a blameless heroine, misstating the facts surrounding her death.
Within a year of the violent assault on the Capitol, the jailed rioters had become for Trump, “political prisoners.” He scapegoated Nancy Pelosi for the decision of his own acting defense secretary not to station troops to protect the Capitol. And, by the time he recorded a song with the “J6 Prison Choir” the whitewashing was well advanced with a false history in place for folks eager to believe.
Like the planning for January 6 over many months, the Big Con –the lies, conspiracies, pretexts, excuses, and whataboutism in seeking to diminish into oblivion the heinous assault on our democracy directed by Donald Trump — didn’t fall into place by happenstance. There was a relentless effort — deliberate, with malice aforethought — to erase history and replace it with a tall tale. In Sarah Longwell’s words:
At the time, everyone, including Republicans, understood how bad it was. Then, brick by brick, they built a foundation of lies to justify doing what they know, deep down, to be wrong. Trump betrayed the country. And so do they.
“They thought the election was a rigged election, and that’s why they came,” Mr. Trump said at the town hall, adding falsely, “There were no guns down there. We didn’t have guns. The others had guns, but we didn’t have guns. And when I say ‘we,’ these are people that walk down, this was a tiny percentage of the overall, which nobody sees and nobody shows. But that was a day of love from the standpoint of the millions, it’s like hundreds of thousands.” And at an event at the Chicago Economic Club this week, Mr. Trump said: “People were angry. People went there. And I’ll tell you what, they never show that, the primary scene in Washington was hundreds of thousands, the largest group of people I’ve ever spoken before, and I’ve spoken before, and it was love and peace. And some people went to the Capitol, and a lot of strange things happened there.”
As crude as it was, the Big Con was effective: millions of Americans accept Trump’s revisionism. The fabrications and conspiracy theories, unsupported by evidence, were flimsy at best. To believe them requires denying what we witnessed, which is well-documented. The confirming evidence is readily accessible to this day. Yet a huge proportion of Republicans accept Trump’s fraudulent narrative.
Views on whether Trump broke the law trying to stay in power after losing the 2020 election, whether the election was stolen from Trump, and whether those convicted in the Jan. 6 insurrection are being held hostage by the government are strongly shaped by partisanship and news viewership.
A slim majority of Americans (53%) agree it is likely that Trump broke the law to try to stay in power after losing the 2020 election, though just 17% of Republicans agree. Americans who most trust Fox News (12%) or far-right news outlets (4%) are the least likely to believe Trump broke the law to stay in power after losing the election.
More than six in ten Republicans (62%), compared with 27% of independents and 4% of Democrats, believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Americans who most trust far-right TV news outlets (84%) and Fox News (64%) are the most likely to agree with the statement that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
Only one in four Americans (25%) agree with Trump’s frequent claim that “the people convicted for their role in the violent Jan. 6 attacks on the U.S. Capitol are really patriots who are being held hostage by the government.”Republicans (46%) are more than twice as likely as independents (20%) and about seven times as likely as Democrats (7%) to agree with this statement.
I regard these survey results as astonishing. The 2020 election was free and fair. Trump conspired over many months to cast doubt on election integrity and, on January 6, intended to stop Congress from certifying his defeat. He incited violence to this end. And violence there was — committed by his supporters.
Republican voters are way off base regarding these factual matters. A huge chunk of the Republican base has been bamboozled.
How did we get here? Political scientists often cite the failures of the leadership of the Republican Party to defend democratic norms (including truth) if that meant crossing Trump. Others point to the effectiveness of Fox News Channel (and other right-wing media) within a closed information silo that shields viewers (and listeners and readers) from inconvenient facts, meaningful context, and balanced coverage. And tribal leaders within the Red camp have waged a campaign for decades to disqualify their political opponents (and constituents) of legitimate political standing: Democrats have become the other, not real Americans.
People look to leaders whom they trust to establish and confirm facts and beliefs. Within a closed system, it’s easy to be misled or mistaken. Solidarity within a group can encourage fear and antagonism of others. These phenomena are true of all of us, not just of MAGA Republicans or Fox News viewers.
In future posts I intend to explore these themes in more detail.
The Ann Telnaes sketch portrays Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Patrick Soon-Shiong, the Walt Disney Company/ABC News, and Jeff Bezos paying tribute to soon-to-be-again President Donald Trump. For the first time in her career, her cartoon was killed “because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary.” Telnaes explains (“Why I’m quitting the Washington Post”):
As an editorial cartoonist, my job is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable. For the first time, my editor prevented me from doing that critical job. So I have decided to leave the Post. I doubt my decision will cause much of a stir and that it will be dismissed because I’m just a cartoonist. But I will not stop holding truth to power through my cartooning, because as they say, “Democracy dies in darkness”.
It is a staggering sum that underscores efforts by donors and corporate interests to curry favor with Mr. Trump ahead of a second presidential term after a number of business leaders denounced him following the violence by his supporters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Trump has promised to gut the “deep state” and made various promises to industry supporters. Among the pledged donors for the inaugural events are Pfizer, OpenAI, Amazon and Meta, along with cryptocurrency firms. The total haul for the committee financing his inaugural festivities — at least $150 million raised, with more expected — will eclipse the record-setting $107 million raised for his 2017 inauguration, according to three people briefed on the matter who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to share internal financial information.
The Times article notes, “Contributions to inaugural committees … are one of the last major opportunities to financially support a second-term president.” The phrase “protection money” does not appear, though there is this:
David Tamasi, a lobbyist who has raised money for Mr. Trump, dismissed a suggestion that corporate interests were giving to avoid Mr. Trump’s wrath, though he acknowledged that some donors may be trying to atone for having previously maintained distance from the president-elect. “It is a time-honored D.C. tradition that corporations are enthusiastically embracing this cycle in all manners, largely because they were on the sidelines during previous Trump cycles,” he said. “They no longer have to hedge their political bets.”
Time-honored indeed (though so are bribery, graft, and extortion). Count on Trump, over the next four years, to push this “D.C. tradition” to limits we’ve never seen before.
As Josh Marshall noted (after the news of the documentary, but before Puck reported the dollar figure), Jeff Bezos is acting rationally. Marshall adds (“Oligarchia, Here We Come“):
This seems like a pretty good sign that the titans of corporate America don’t look content to just be friendly to Trump but definitely go all in as special friends to the incoming President. It may not be quite North Korea territory, though who knows? But it does look more and more like the model of post-Soviet republics in which you have a nominal democracy in which an emerging class of oligarchs bid for the favor of the strong man with accelerating and competitive feats of dignity-losing strength. First, ABC’s decision to take the L in Trump’s defamation suit. Now, Jeff Bezos’s decision to fund a look at the heroic story of Melania Trump’s rise from post-Titoist Yugoslavia to trendsetter in the field of arm-candying.
And, of course, other prominent oligarchs are on board. For those keeping score:
Donations to Biden’s inaugural fund in 2021: Meta = $0 Tim Cook = $0 Sam Altman = $0 Google = $200,000 Amazon = $200,000
Donations to Trump’s inaugural fund in 2025: Meta = $1,000,000 Tim Cook = $1,000,000 Sam Altman = $1,000,000 Google = $1,000,000 Amazon = $1,000,000
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote a prescient bestseller, How Democracies Die, which was published not quite two years after Donald Trump landed in the White House. Although the authors inform us (in the introduction of Tyranny of Minority Rule) that they were surprised by what transpired in the last two years of that term — “We have studied violent insurrections and efforts to overturn elections all over the world, from France and Spain to Ukraine and Russia to the Philippines, Peru, and Venezuela. But we never imagined we’d see them here. Nor did we ever imagine that one of America’s two major parties would turn away from democracy in the 21st century.” — their book offers a clear explanatory framework, foreshadowing what took place after their book went to print in January 2018.
In an interview with Michael Tomasky, they suggest something else they had not foreseen: that as Trump returns to power with Republican control of both houses of Congress, attacks on civil society and on political opponents pose the greatest threat to our democratic institutions.
As Ziblatt puts it: “the need to rewrite the Constitution, say à la Viktor Orbán, is probably not the thing that’s concerning at this moment, because our Constitution works pretty well for the party that’s in control of all branches of government, and really the more serious concern is the risk of those in power going after the democratic opposition in ways that undermine competition. So it’s not about changing the rules, but really attacking civil society, attacking the opposition. That’s something that we really didn’t spell out in that scenario back in 2018, but it’s something that is top of mind for me right now.”
Levitsky suggests that “we’re going to see really classic authoritarian behavior. Many of us tend to think that—particularly given that most of us haven’t experienced authoritarianism in the United States—we tend to think of authoritarianism as dissolving the Constitution, locking up opponents, and eliminating electoral competition. And that’s highly unlikely. It’s very, very unlikely that we see a move toward sort of Putin-style authoritarianism.”
He continues:
But what I think has gotten insufficient attention among Americans is the centrality of simply politicizing the state and deploying it in ways not only to punish rivals, but also to change the cost-benefit calculation of actors across the political spectrum and throughout civil society so that they have an incentive to sort of step to the sidelines. And so, you know, first and foremost, we’ve been told to expect that the Department of Justice will be wielded to punish those who have tried to hold the Trump administration accountable. I think we’ll see it wielded against some politicians. We’ll see it wielded against some businesspeople. We’ll see it wielded against some civil society leaders. We may see it wielded against Harvard and other elite universities. So I think this government will, far more than the first Trump administration, politicize key state agencies and wield them in ways that raise the cost of continued opposition. There may be a handful, dozens, of exemplary cases, but those cases have the potential to signal to thousands and thousands of other people that it’s just not worth engaging in politics the way they used to before. And so, young lawyers will not jump into politics, but rather stay in the law firm. Young journalists will decide to stick to the sports beat rather than cover politics. Young CEOs will decide that it’s better just not to donate to the Democratic Party. It’s very difficult to gauge how consequential that will be, but that tilting of the playing field is coming.
Let’s underscore that “classic authoritarian” threat (which goes beyond hollowing out effective government agencies and weaponizing law enforcement against Trump’s opponents): to change the cost-benefit calculation of actors across the political spectrum and throughout civil society so that they have an incentive to sort of step to the sidelines.
This authoritarian strategy is already seeing success even before Trump’s return to the White House.
Consider the billionaires and corporate CEOs who own and run mass communications outfits. Two recent headlines describe the threat to these folks (“Trump signals plans to use all levers of power against the media“) and the media’s swift response (“Media’s suck up moment“). Threats from the president-elect and his MAGA allies have hardly been veiled. The folks threatened understand how much financial and reputational damage a hostile federal government could bring. They are already falling into line. That’s anticipatory obedience.
Timothy Snyder, in On Tyranny, warns in Lesson #1: “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want and then offer themselves without being asked.”
Yeah, that’s happening. Right before our eyes.
And it’s not just media moguls. Once upon a time, in the aftermath of the January 6 rioting at the Capitol, corporations pledged to withhold support for those who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election. These businesses were for democracy then. But that promise has gone by the wayside for many of them, as they offer lavish inaugural gifts in tribute to the vindictive soon-to-return president.
The incentives have changed. The world is different. It’s tougher to refuse to obey. Our freedom is more constrained than before.
[Post edited for clarity and additional links added on January 2, 2025.]
President-elect Trump’s Christmas message (via Truth Social) suggests that he fails to appreciate (or even grasp) the spirit of Christmas as traditionally understood. Peace on earth? Faith, hope, and charity? The blessings of giving? Good will toward all? The birth of a Savior?
Naw. None of that. Those sentiments have nothing to do with Trump or his “MERRY CHRISTMAS!” that follows “GO TO HELL!” and “MAY THEY ROT IN HELL.”
We can, however, see a faithful, unwavering reflection of the man – and his embrace of Christmas – if we look at his Trump Store site. Donald Trump is never more in his element, never does his character reveal itself more clearly, than when he is squeezing a profit off his name. And he is at it now as never before.
The Trump Store has a gift for every patriot on your Christmas list. It’s a little late for this year’s celebrations, but you can get a very early jump on next year and count down with the $38 Trump Advent calendar. Or trim the tree with a $95 Mar-a-Lago bauble or a $16 MAGA hat ornament, sold in nine colors. (A glass version of the hat ornament is $92.) Stuff stockings with an $86 “GIANT Trump Chocolate Gold Bar” and a $22 pair of candy cane socks printed with “Trump.” Prepare a holiday feast with a $14 Trump Christmas tree pot holder and $28 Trump apron featuring Santa waving an American flag. The profits from these holiday trinkets do not benefit a political committee or a charitable cause, but the Trump Organization, the Trump family’s privately owned conglomerate of real estate, hotel and lifestyle businesses. As the company encouraged customers to celebrate the holidays with Trump gifts for all ages, President-elect Donald Trumppersonally profited off of his upcoming term in a manner that is unprecedented in modern history — even during his unconventional first stint in the White House.
Take a look. The pull-down menu for Collections features Holiday Gift Guide,45-47, Trump 45 Collection, Fall Collection,Sweet Treats, The Honey Collection,Pickleball Court Sports, Gold Collection,Mar-A-Lago, Made in America, and New Arrivals.
Something for everyone on your list. Men, women, kids, and dogs. A range of price-points. And links at the bottom of the page to other Trump-branded stuff (hotels, golf, real estate, wine). Trump and family are making a play to cash-in big time on his second go-round in the White House.
Now that represents, for Donald Trump, the spirit of the season. The message is loud and clear.
